[Buddha-l] 9. Attadiipaa Sutta (Joy Vriens)

[JKirkpatrick]

My two cents on this translation takes a more literary tack.
Buddhist canonical literature of the sort under discussion here
makes very little use of the term "island" as a social metaphor,
far as I've been able to tell.  All his life the Buddha strove to
keep the sangha together, to keep it working and moving around,
teaching and contemplating. Why would he, when dying, decide to
nullify his monk collectivity, his new dispensation (a la Stephen
Batchellor), even if he felt that things were falling apart, by
asking them to become social isolates? I go along with Joy in
that the Buddha's monks were certainly a collective bunch of
people, with rather few outliers of the type of Mahakashyapa

For the Buddha to tell someone to be an island unto himself,
instead of a lamp unto himself, has always struck me as absurd, a
crudity of translation.  In fact, now that I think of it (always
dangerous), classical poetics rarely used the term dviipa as a
metaphor for anything human, much less the inner life. (According
to Monier, dviipa in the MBh also meant place of refuge, shelter
, protection or protector. But it was a 'place,' not an inner
state.) 

How could anyone be inspired by imagining themselves as an
island, as compared to the image of a lighted lamp?, those small
unfired earthen diipas that are found all over India, once used
for light at night within a dwelling,  probably in a kuti as
well. (Today it's candles or electricity.) "Island" for diipa in
this context must be an erroneous translation.

The term 'atta', in the phrase 'attadiipaa', suggests to me that
the Buddha was advising the monks to internalise awareness of the
lamp of his teachings, using atta poetically to replace the sense
of atta as a 'self' with atta as the site of a deep-felt
'illumination'. 

Joanna 


On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 8:33 AM, Mitchell Ginsberg
<jinavamsa at yahoo.com> wrote:
> hello Joy and all,
> The Pali diipa can mean, as you point out, either island or
lamp (source of light).
> The Sanskrit has two different words that would each/both
correspond to diipa in Pali: dviipa and diipa................